Microsoft is building its own cloud gaming service. Company officials demonstrated a prototype of the service during an internal company meeting today. Sources familiar with the meeting revealed to The Verge that Microsoft demonstrated Halo 4 running on a Windows Phone and PC, both streaming the game from the cloud. We're told that the concept service runs smoothly on both devices, and that Microsoft has managed to reduce the latency on a Lumia 520 to just 45ms.

The final nail in the coffin for Microsoft Games on PC. No more PC Games from their studios, the answer will just be "Why? You can just stream Xbox Games to your PC"

Just because they're showing it can be done doesn't mean they're going to shift everything to that. In the end though, but we're talking way down the line, lots of things will just be streamed to your client which will be nothing but a dumb terminal. Once every last place gets super fast internet that is. Till then this will be a bonus and shows that MS can do backwards compatibility this way going forward.

This is very interesting considering that there was an interview with the Xbox head guy a while back where he said that they were considering a streaming service, something they wanted to offer.

It seems like they are farther along than I thought. It would seem that MS I much closer to a Gaikai-like servce. This could certainly be an issue for Sony, which is still trying to get its service going early next year for the US.

The bigger picture here is that MS seems to be very interested in created a game service, something that does not require certain hardware, something that can be accessed on a range of devices not possible before. Look at MS' other work and you will see the pattern of migrating all of their software to the cloud and selling it as a service instead of individual copies.

So the latency to what is likely their own servers in the same location as the test is 45ms... meanwhile, in the realworld where servers aren't right nearby, latency on input will be like dialup and unbearable.

So the latency to what is likely their own servers in the same location as the test is 45ms... meanwhile, in the realworld where servers aren't right nearby, latency on input will be like dialup and unbearable.

So the latency to what is likely their own servers in the same location as the test is 45ms... meanwhile, in the realworld where servers aren't right nearby, latency on input will be like dialup and unbearable.

Why do you assume that their servers are in the same location? We don't know where the game was streaming from, it could be right from a beta service running on some Azure datacenter and not in the same building.

Why do you assume that their servers are in the same location? We don't know where the game was streaming from, it could be right from a beta service running on some Azure datacenter and not in the same building.

Yeah that's what I was wondering as well. I mean, no one has said the servers were at the same location.

Why do you assume that their servers are in the same location? We don't know where the game was streaming from, it could be right from a beta service running on some Azure datacenter and not in the same building.

Because of the unrealistically low latency. Look up test on things like gaikai/onlive and you'll see why i say that.

Because of the unrealistically low latency. Look up test on things like gaikai/onlive and you'll see why i say that.

Common sense should tell you that most of the latency comes from server processing and not the round trip. Even if its locally routed your probably still looking at a latency of 20ms~ due to latency mostly being throughput determined. Azure is the most competent server farming platform in the world.

Because of the unrealistically low latency. Look up test on things like gaikai/onlive and you'll see why i say that.

How is it unrealistically low. I live put in nowhere using adsl, that is transmitted wirelessly from a mountain top nearby to the ISP server and from there to the world. And if I don't saturate my outgoing line I can easily get 16 to 20 pings within the country at least.